Crazy '80s

I don’t consider myself to be an especially talented guy, but the talents I do have are somewhat unique. From a very young age, I’ve been able to say the alphabet backwards. (Which, when I did it at age 3, used to freak out my beloved grandmother. I might as well have been speaking in tongues.) I can release the pressure on my DVR fast forward button at precisely the right moment so that I minimize commercial breaks without going too far and running into the actual programming. (This talent impresses me far more than my nonplussed “better half.”)

Last, but not least, is my ability to spot a Jim Steinman composition a mile away. As I’ve grown older, I realize that this talent might not be all that special, so blatantly obvious are their fingerprints. But even at age 11, when two Steinman-penned songs sat 1 and 2 on the Billboard charts for a time in the fall of 1983, I could tell that they were somehow symmetrical, even if I didn’t know the exact link at the time.

You see, all Steinman’s songs have some core values to which they adhere rigidly. There are the grandiose arrangements. There are the verbose lyrics, featuring metaphors so heavy-handed you could spot them from Pluto. Said lyrics usually feature some repetitive phrase that pounds into the listener with subtlety of a jack-hammer. These songs are usually exhaustingly long, cartoonishly obvious, and, in spite of it all, oddly fascinating.

Steinman, of course, honed this approach on Bat Out Of Hell, Meat Loaf’s hambone opus that charmed all the world (with the exception of a few unamused rock critics) in 1977. When Loaf’s follow-up tanked due to a momentum-killing three-year hiatus, weaker songs, and the inexplicable presence of Cher, Steinman worked on the music for a movie called A Little Night Music, and from that work sprang melodies that would reform themselves into “Total Eclipse Of The Heart” and “Making Love Out Of Nothing At All,” the songs that would form the 1-2 punch of 1983.

The legend is that both songs were offered to Meat Loaf but his record company wouldn’t cough up the dough for them; the Loaf might have been an unlikely rock icon throughout the decade rather than a Behind The Music producer’s dream had he possessed these two gems. Instead, “Eclipse” went to gravelly-voiced Welsh singer Bonnie Tyler while “Love” was scooped up by Air Supply, the Australian Lite-FM mavens.

Steinman was wise enough to hire a crack band to perform the anthems and these pros kept the schlock level at a minimum. E Streeters Roy Bittan on piano and Max Weinberg on drums, Bat Out Of Hell veterans, brought their “Born To Run”-style mix of tinkle and thunder to the proceedings, while Mr. Rock And Roll Hoochie Koo himself, Rick Derringer, provided the lighter-waving guitar solo on “Making Love.”

The songs themselves are nearly identical as constructs; the piano riffs, the crashing drums, the ghostly backing vocals, and the acrobatic melodies, which were delivered with heart-on-their-sleeves anguish by Tyler and Russell Hitchcock (leaving his Air Supply cohort Graham Russell to do some truly tragic bad acting in the video for “Love”). And the lyrics seemed tailor-made for the karaoke craze that was years down the road. How many of us have witnessed unfortunate drunken performances of these warhorses, usually culminating in an on-stage collapse and ejection from the bar?

I could go on and on here, about the “Eclipse” video, a trippy mix of interpretive dance, fencing, and the cast of the Children of the Damned that was fittingly filmed in an insane asylum, or about “Read Em And Weep,” a Steinman effort that didn’t quite match the magic of these other songs for Barry Manilow. That’s the thing about Steinman: He throws so much at you that you can’t possibly wrap your head around all of the extravagant excess in one sitting.

All I know is that even as a kid, I felt a little ashamed to like these songs, and you’re talking about a kid who proudly owned a Men Without Hats cassette. When they’d come on in the radio, I’d feign annoyance and roll my eyes, but I’d never change the station. And when nobody was looking, I’d be mouthing all of those impossible-to-forget one-liners: “Living in a powder keg and giving off sparks” or “The beating of my heart is a drum and it’s lost/And it’s looking for a rhythm like you” or, of course, “Turn around, bright eyes.”

You can call these songs a lot of things, but you can never call them dull. And you too may be able to spot a Jim Steinman song a mile away, but you have to admit that the charts and the radio dial were a lot more fun with them than they are without them. If I had a gigantic voice and wanted to make a big splash on the music scene these days, Steinman would be the first guy I’d call.

And that’s the truth, Bright Eyes.

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